


Comic Timing

by eris



Category: British Actor RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-29
Updated: 2009-11-29
Packaged: 2017-11-27 10:17:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/660812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eris/pseuds/eris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some days are worse than others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Comic Timing

Some days are worse than others. Some days end in the sort of ache that makes Hugh wonder if he's somehow offended gravity, that it's giving him twice his fair share. On those days he barely manages to strip to his vest and pants before he rolls over the porcelain edge of his bath and sinks into the scalding water half-dressed. It's a good burn, though, very good, spreading from his skin to his muscles to bone in a delicious, floating, detached sort of pain, coaxing him down just beneath the surface of consciousness, where everything is softly and blissfully dark, simple, exquisite, and-- 

\--inevitably the water has gone tepid when he wakes. 

And as Hugh peels off sopping clothes and steps away from the unpleasant puddles, he finds himself thinking fondly of vicodin. _Fame and fortune for you_ , he thinks, half-heartedly towelling off. Fifteen hours a day as addict on American telly, so he can shrivel in his absurdly spacious jacuzzi tub and wish for a real stockpile of pills. In West Hollywood, no less, where he could practically flip open the phone directory and dial a fine line of coke delivered to door, 30 minutes or your order is free. 

Oh indeed, that would go well. 

> 1\. INT. DOORWAY - NIGHT.  
>  MCU: INTERNATIONAL TELEVISION STAR SHIFTS AWKWARDLY, RUBS THE BACK OF HIS NECK.
> 
> **HUGH LAURIE:**  
>  (LOW) Have you... you know, have you got any... _stuff?_  
> 
>
>> SOUND: A DOZEN TABLOID REPORTERS BREATHING HEAVILY

He feels so _old_ , in this place. 

He once read something about this in an interview. Maybe he'd said it, or it could have been Stephen; he can never remember who said what, as they spent most of their interviews talking bollocks, and he'd surely read this one by accident, probably in the waiting room for the dentist. He read: they'd been brilliant, back then, the two of them, a perfect double act. Just brilliant. They still talk about finding time in their schedules to work together. But it wouldn't be the same now, would it? There's a point when it just doesn't work anymore, their sort of comedy. A point when you're too grown up to make fun of the grown-ups, when the costumes aren't really costumes anymore. 

(Stephen would probably tell him to take it with a grain of salt. Except Stephen might say it in Latin. _Grano salis, Hugh_ , Stephen might say. _From Pliny the Elder's_ Naturalis Historia _, a poison's antidote recipe called for salt--_ ) 

Hugh leaves his wet clothes in a pile by the tub. Some wandering thought with his dead mother's voice scolds about mildew, but he's halfway to the bottle of scotch by then. (In a rare exercise of strategic foresight on Hugh's part, the flat is arranged so that any particular starting point in any particular room is exactly halfway to a bottle of scotch.) His skin feels clammy and sticky and generally worse off than before, but he pulls the towel around his waist all the same and collapses onto his fifteen-thousand-dollar sofa with liquor in one hand and mobile in the other, feeling more than a little pathetic. Like a blue-filtered scene in some bleak indie film that might scape a few festival nods even though no sane human being could bear to sit through it again. 

Scotch, sore muscles, self-loathing. Method acting: very American. 

Hugh turns his phone back and forth, half-hearted sleight-of-hand tricks, tapping out numbers too lightly to actually dial. 3:30AM, the ID field accuses. Self-pity o'clock. 

Respectably afternoonish in London. 

The line rings three times while Hugh swears and downs his glass, falls back with crossed ankles and actually wonders, more than a little desperately, whether his ceiling qualifies as ivory white, seashell white, or cream. Can't exactly complain about rotten luck once you've become a multi-millionaire, but if you've got to complain about something, there's always the paint job in your borrowed luxury home. 

(So _useless_ , on his own. Between them he was never the one who carried solitude with grace.) 

"Definitely seashell," Hugh announces, pre-empting any salutations. "Filthy, unrepentant liars, estate agents. I was assured a cool, modern ivory with primary accents." 

It's completely and utterly idiotic, but it feels like the first thing Hugh has said all week that he hasn't examined for the proper inflexions, wrenched into careful, unnatural shapes. 

There is a brief and gently baffled silence, followed by an incredulous, "Hugh," which is just heart-breakingly familiar, isn't it, "isn't it--" 

Then a rustling sound, maybe the phone shifting to Stephen's other ear, maybe a newspaper folding a few thousand miles away. When Stephen speaks again his voice is soft and level and just the perfectly tactful distance from cautious that Hugh suddenly finds more annoying than anything else on the planet. "Hugh my darling, dare I ask _why_ you're awake at this hour?" 

"These Hollywood parties," Hugh replies, a retaliatory hair's-breadth from the mean-spirited sort of sarcasm. "They're _wild._ " 

"And it falls on me to advise your debaucheries, does it? I'll have you know I am pure as the driven snow." 

It's just plain unsporting, the way Stephen humours him. Hugh's irritation bleeds away, undeserved, unfair, but in its absence all that remains is the hollowed-out exhaustion, the awareness of his own manic absurdity. He's opening his mouth to make some puerile excuse about programming his new phone when Stephen says, "can't you sleep, dear?" 

Hugh shifts, uncrosses his ankles and crosses them the other way around. "Hypothetically speaking," he hazards, "would it flatter or offend you to learn you are my personal equivalent of vicodin?" 

"I really don't know," Stephen says, sounding equal parts amused and bewildered. "Dare I estimate your blood alcohol concentration, as we speak?" 

"Is that a relevant variable?" 

"I'm sure your liver will have a few words on the subject." 

"It's a whole thing, over here," Hugh explains, "small acts of wanton self-destruction. The _dernier cri_ , if you will." 

"Hugh," Stephen says. 

_Are you completely stupid?_

"Yes." 

_The thing is,_ Hugh thinks, because there's no energy left in him to form the words. _About that. The thing is, Stephen--_

That this is getting old, this is looking back on everything that could have been but wasn't. Mortality at his heels. The goddamned mid-life crisis which he is evidently generic enough to have. Does this even happen outside the writer's room? He is losing his frame of reference on reality. 

"We miss you terribly." 

And the thing is that none of this understanding changes the fact there is nothing else in the world he wants so much. All the time. Right at this very moment. He has never wanted anything like he _wants_ \-- 

Would Stephen pity him? Stephen, who weathered these storms so very long ago, and Hugh suspects he kept an unfair distance all the while, and who is he to think he has any right to impose now on his oldest, dearest friend--who is finally, after so many years of constant fighting with himself, _finally_ unequivocably happy? 

Stephen is probably saying something about a holiday. "There's just no time, out here," Hugh mumbles in the gaps, dizzy and sick. Half of their lifetimes. Has it really taken this long? 

"I know exactly what you mean," Stephen is saying, something about a mini-series, a spring schedule, and if Hugh shields the receiver from his breathing and silently pulls himself off while Stephen reasons through his next blog entry on the phone, well, what's that in the grand scheme of things? _Grano salis, Hugh_ , he'll say, after he buries himself in damp cushions and sleeps the night through for the first time in a week. A poison's antidote calls for salt.


End file.
